I clicked the receiver angrily for a moment, but Gertrude had hung up. Her high-handed manner irritated me, but that was her characteristic. We were more leagues apart, Gertrude and I, than ever she or I could travel backward. And though the results of our meeting seemed to be unsatisfactory to Gertrude, I must in justice to her admit that she is always an admirable hostess. I had telephoned to my house that I was not to be expected to dinner, and when Griselda had dryly answered, "Ye don’t know what ye’ll miss," I thought with a pang that I knew more about that than she did. Gertrude’s calm and comfortable atmosphere, however, her deep chairs and sofas and the air of excluding a disorderly world, were not disagreeable to one fresh from the filthy pavements south of Fourth Street. Could those junk shops, paper-box factories, delicatessen "garages" and machine shops be in the same world with Gertrude’s flat, in Gramercy Park? Yet they were only a little more than a mile away, and those were my real world, my daily environment. Gertrude’s flat was now foreign ground. "Yes—goose of a man!—don’t you see? What could be better? The man comes back anxious to reassume his responsibilities. You have had a Hades of a time, but you have done the square thing, acquitted yourself like a man and a hero. And now the little romance ends happily and everything is satisfactory and you are free again—what could be more delightful?" The heaviness of my heart portended anything but delight, but I remained silent. "Don’t think I am being trivial, Ranny," she resumed with a more sober vehemence. "It was a wonderful thing to do. I feel I was wrong in what I advised in the past. Your sticking to the children has done heaps for you—for your development, I mean—more for you than for them, perhaps," she inserted as a parenthesis with a laugh. "But don’t be quixotic now. Everything’s coming right in the best of all possible worlds. So don’t go throwing a wrench into the machinery just because you’ve had the wrench in your hand so long you can’t think what else to do with it!" "I am not good at changes," I murmured gloomily. "I was catapulted from one kind of life into another by main force of circumstances. Now I don’t feel I can stand being shot back into something else. The wear and tear, the strain is too great." I will not deny that what I chiefly saw at that moment was a disruption that would rob me not only of the affection of the children of which I could not speak, but of Alicia, of whom I could speak even less. Gertrude graciously lit a cigarette for me and sat down beside me. She herself, however, was not smoking. "There is one change, Ranny," she began in a new and strange voice that was almost tender, "that would do you more good than anything else in the world—can you guess what I mean?" "A trip abroad?" I fumbled uncertainly. "No"—smiled Gertrude quietly laying her hand on mine, "I mean—marriage."